From Nimble Pro to Pluralsight Juggernaut | Multithreaded Income Episode 22 with Steve Smith

Uh, we're working with a lot of companies now that have legacy dot net apps that they're trying to move to the cloud or move to dot net eight. Um, and that's, you know, a good opportunity for us because we can help them redesign their apps and learn better practices along the way. And, um, really, really add a lot of value to these companies that already have working software, but want to make it better.

Um, I've been doing training for a long time, uh, since 2002 or so, uh, been doing independent training for software development teams and on plural site since about 2010, which makes me one of the. Uh, more seasoned authors there, uh, and just published my, my latest course, uh, less than a month ago on, uh, refactoring to solid C sharp code, uh, which takes some pretty nasty real world looking code and, and looks at how to refactor that kind of stuff.

So that's, uh, that's it for me for now, I think.

So I was like, I'll just be our Dallas. Cause you know, trying to get S Smith or something is, is a fool's errand. So, uh, Uh, eventually I just kept using it for various things because it was usually available. Uh, and, and so it became my sort of online identity. Uh, and I answer to our Dallas now, cause that's just kind of my, my brand. I have our Dallas. com and all that. So

And, and we had ads on there from various component vendors and, and Microsoft would advertise there and stuff. Uh, and we, we started an ad company sort of managing these ads for that site and a bunch of similar sites. Um, and that became our, our full time. Company. Um, and around then I was, I was getting into speaking at conferences and it wasn't unusual that people would come up to me after a conference talk and say, Hey, that was really great. Can you help us with that in our company?

And I would have to say, no, I don't, I don't, I don't do that consulting thing. I've got this company and we sell ads and whatever. And, um, and it seemed pretty obvious after a few of those, that's like, we're leaving money on the table. How could we capitalize on this? And at the same time we were struggling trying to um, Build our features as fast as we wanted to for the ad business, because we're competing with like Google and other places that do ads.

And so it was, it was hard for a small shop to keep up. Um, and so we got the idea that we would just start a consulting company and we'd be able to take on these, these folks that wanted consulting. Um, and when our consultants weren't busy with other clients, they could be building the ad, uh, software for the ad company. And that worked pretty well for a few years. Um, ultimately we ended up selling. The ad company in 2009, uh, and, and that was to, uh, the code project.

And I went and worked for them for a couple of years. And Michelle ran nimble pros for a few years there. Uh, and then right, as I was wrapping that up and coming back to nimble pros, we sold them a pros to tell Eric, uh, and, and tell Eric, you know, bought the company. And we went and worked for them for a few years until they got acquired themselves by progress. And they spun off the consulting arm and basically just let everyone go. So, uh, a few years passed.

All our team went and worked at different places. Um, and then, you know, we, we started picking up some of them, uh, again, uh, I was working myself just under the our Dallas name at that point. I was our Dallas services. Um, but then we rebranded back to nimble pros, uh, a few years ago. So, and we have a few of our previous members have come back and rejoined.

Uh, and that is. The best way to get yourself to stand out from other people, because if you just try and market yourself as, Hey, I'm a JavaScript developer, or I'm a front end developer, I'm a dot net developer, right? That no one, no one needs a dot net developer, right? They need a developer that knows their particular set of circumstances, their domain, their, their stack, their tech, right? They don't need a front end developer.

They need, you know, the best react developer around that can come in and clean up all the mess they've made with their react application. Right? And so if you bill yourself as like, I build react applications, right. Or I fix react apps or, you know, I, I make entity framework, you know, run right. And, and fast, like now you're talking, cause now you've got a value that you bring that isn't just generic and isn't just off the shelf. Um, and the way you establish that.

I think, um, so you should be writing, writing blogs or you should be on YouTube or you should be on Twitter or ideally all of the above, but, you know, pick whatever the easiest ones are for you to do, uh, and find a way to get your, your content out there, uh, which will help people.

But you'll help you because as you, as you develop content, you have to really understand it or at least understand it better, uh, in order to articulate it, uh, to people, right, in order to share it in a meaningful way. Um, and, and so there's a quote I love called to teach is to learn twice. And so like every time you write a blog post or you make a YouTube video or something, you show someone how to solve some problem, your understanding of that problem increases.

So it's helping you and of course helping other people and elevating their trust in you and their, their understanding that you're, you're an authority, you know what you're talking about. You're that guy that a girl that has that blog or has that book that you wrote or whatever it might be.

Uh, and the, and the general idea about that type of marketing versus outbound marketing and, and like advertising and, and pay for click ads and things like that is that if, if you're in the pay for click business, you just, you know, you optimize your Google ad spend every month. You're at the mercy of someone who doesn't know how to do that and doesn't know the value of things, but has a bunch of money showing up and just completely derailing your, your strategy, right?

Maybe they got a bunch of, of investment money from, from, you know, some, some sponsor or some startup. Uh, and, and they're like, Hey, I've got a million dollars. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm going to buy all these keywords. Right. And they just blow you out of the water because now all the keywords that you'd highly optimized for, uh, overnight, they're 10 times as expensive, right? With content marketing, that'll never happen. Right.

If you have a bunch of content that all establishes you as an authority and you got a bunch of, you know, traffic coming to you because of that content, no one's going to just overnight get rid of that, except maybe Google, if they change their algorithm and decide to like drop your website or something. But, you know, you're not gonna be at the mercy of somebody else's ad spend.

Because I, I think a lot of posts, uh, you do this often. They're these tomes of here's how you solve these hard problems that the documentation isn't covering. Do, do you have your site and you also have NimblePros? Does NimblePros put out its own articles

Um, but if you were to say, Hey, you want to just come on camera and, you know, spend 20 minutes talking about how you did X with, you know, that problem, then like, yeah, I can do that. You know, I don't know if I don't have to do any of the work. I just have to show up and talk and, you know, hopefully not sound like an idiot and we can always edit it later. It's not live. Um, and so that lowers the bar quite a bit.

So. Um, that's part of why I'd like to, to, to delve more into that with nimble pros, cause I can have, uh, various team members or even clients if they're, if they're up for it, you know, come on and just let, let's talk about this cool thing we did, um, and, and, and not have it be as big of a hurdle to do.

So take my days or weeks or months worth of time, pain and experience and dwell it down to, well, if you had just done this one little thing, you wouldn't have had to worry about all that. That's my biggest fear, is someone coming in and being a little bit smarter than me. And Kind of showing me that I just I was completely wrong, which I guess is a good thing, right? If

So, you know, if I do a course on solid principles, they're not going to come out with solid principles version 2 next year and version 3 the year after that. Whereas if I'm trying to talk about angular, uh, or react, it's like, you know, no one's going to watch that course after 2 years because there's going to be a newer, better version of it.

Um, That's come out and I'm going to have to constantly be redoing the same course over and over just to keep up instead of finding new courses that can kind of expand my, my reach. Um, so, so that was part of my, uh, success, I think is attributed to that decision. Uh, and in plural sites, just done a tremendous job of, of, you know, getting market share, uh, acquiring competitors and doing other things. They they've had some rocky.

Times themselves with, with layoffs and, you know, they went public and then it went back private and that's, you know, had some organizational changes and things, but, you know, on the whole, it's, it's been a very successful. Uh, company in a very successful relationship with, with me, um, overall.

Um, and so in the earlier days, 2009, 2012 and in there. You know, it was easier, uh, to pick your topics and then as plural site grew and became more popular both with their audience, but also with authors, um, the available spaces in which you could find content started to get tougher. Like everybody had kind of staked out their area.

Uh, and it wasn't unusual that someone would publish a course that really like stepped on somebody else's toes and and that author didn't even know that was coming. And it was, you know, it caused some animosity or some surprise that, you know, suddenly Pluralsight would publish this thing when, like, I already have this thing. Why are you? Why are you publishing a thing that destroys my thing? Um, and that's hard, right?

If you were, if you were If you're a Pluralsight, if you're in their shoes, like it's, it's difficult to, to thread the needle on that sometimes, because you want to have new content and you want to focus the content on, you know, different audiences. Like maybe there was a course for C sharp, but now we have one for Java or, or whatever. Um. Um, even if it's conceptually the same thing, uh, you know, they could still support having two courses on it.

Um, so, so there was, there was some of that, but, uh, overall, uh, I've had the most say on, on what I wanted to talk about. I just, I sometimes had to, you know, make it fit into what they were looking for. Uh, an example would be, uh, at one point I did a talk on, or a course on refactoring for Azure. Uh, and you know what refactoring for Azure isn't really any different than refactoring. Period. Like, it doesn't matter if you're using Azure. It's just refactoring.

You're making the code work better. Um, but they really wanted one for Azure because Microsoft was pushing them to build this Azure, uh, skill tree, this, this, you know, learning path. Um, and so they wanted to have that in that learning path and it had to have for Azure, like, you know, be that focus. Um, and so I did that because they asked me to, um, and, and, you know, I wanted to be in that path that, you know, ostensibly was going to have all these, all these people beating a path to it.

Um, And, and it was, it was fine. Right. And it was largely similar to other refactoring courses I'd already done, but we, you know, designed a little bit more with, with Azure in mind. So there, there, there's some times when I've done stuff for, uh, more at their request than what I wanted to do. Um, but it was still in the domain of things that I generally would talk about.

Uh, and there's people that really want to do it, that will submit, you know, over and over again until, until they get it right. Um, so just because they say no, once I wouldn't be discouraged forever, right? You know, fix whatever feedback they give you and, and come back in three or six months and try again. Um, I certainly wouldn't.

Okay. Argue against trying to submit for pluralsight, but even if you are accepted as an author They only have a limited selection of things that they're looking for right now And it might not be what you're good at or what you want to teach So I wouldn't I wouldn't caution against getting in there and seeing what they have Available for topics and seeing if it's anything that you want to talk about Um, but if there's not, don't sit and wait until that becomes true.

Like go, go do your thing somewhere else. Um, you know, that's, that's the more important thing is to produce the content, uh, and, and build that audience of, of people that see that you know what you're talking about.

What type of process do you have for setting up an outline, telling that story, figuring out what videos you have to record, what order you have to record them, and getting that information in a way that people can actually learn?

They may have certain learning objectives that they want to hit because they've been talking to their customers and their customers are saying, Hey, we really want our employees to know X, Y, and Z. And so those X, Y, Z bullet points become learning objectives for your course. Um, and, and that wasn't always the case. I mean, it used to be authors had a lot more. Uh, it was more author driven of what, what the story was and how you wanted to tell it.

Uh, and, and, you know, there's, there's pros and cons to that, obviously, but they do kind of force you to do some of that thought up front. So, uh, you do have an idea going in of, of this is how many modules there's going to be. And here's the different sections within those modules. And that kind of is the outline of, of the course, um, from, from that standpoint.

Uh, and then they've, they've got data that tells you things like, you know, how long should modules be, how long should demos and clips be, and you can. Kind of bend those rules if you need to, but it's sort of like, you know, your general guidance is that they should be, you know, between X and Y minutes long and then things like that. So that kind of helps guide you toward a more consistent product that, you know, is, is generally going to be successful with, with their audience.

Because then, and even today, Those courses get a lot of views on plural site, and that's how you get paid is by how many people watch your course. Uh, and so, you know, I really wanted to be the authority on asp. net core when it was new, when everybody was going to jump in and try and learn it. Uh, so I could get that fundamentals course. And, uh, when.

At that time, when, when Pluralsight was thinking about what they wanted to do, they, they basically said, well, we're going to have this, this RFP process, and we're going to have a blind, uh, selection based on based on proposals that we get, uh, and we'll pick whichever one has the best proposal and not consider who the author is. And I'm like, How does that make any sense? Right? Like I'm the guy I'm the one writing the documentation for this.

I've been doing it for like a year and you know, whatever random person writes a proposal that you happen to like better, you know, if somebody else writes a better proposal, tell me what's in it. Now I'll do that, right? But I know what I'm doing. And then the other thing was they said, well, we're not actually going to do a fundamentals course.

We're going to do a bunch of little courses that are broken up, and we're not going to let anybody do, you know, ASP course stuff unless they're part of this path that we're prescribing and creating. And we're going to be super strict about it. Um, and then, you know, I didn't get the course that I wanted the intro course. And then I also, you know, around that same time, like, as it's launching, another author published a big, long course on how to build a website.

So. And, and had done it all with ASP. NET Core, right? And it wasn't an ASP. NET Core course, but it was still like an ASP. NET Core course, right? Uh, and I was like, Oh, wait, I thought we weren't doing it. Oh, well, well, they got special permission. Like what? Right. So that, that kind of thing kind of rubbed me the wrong way to the point that I was like, you know what? I'm going to make my ASP. NET Core course. Cause I really want to do this. Uh, and so I did go and self publish it.

In fact, we, uh, my wife and I, and two other co founders. We started a training company, um, called called DevIQ and DevIQ still exists. It's a, it's a domain I've had for a long time. Um, and it's a reference site, but for a couple of years there, it was, it was also a training company and had some courses on it. Uh, and so we worked on that for a couple of years.

Um, And, and I was able to get almost a dozen people to buy it per month for, for like, you know, a year or two. And, uh, that, that was, that was not great.

Um, and the thing that was really galling is, is while we're working on this for a couple of years and, and we're trying to build this company and try and build content for it and try and get third party content, um, Every quarter, I would get a check from Pluralsight for the courses I'd done prior to that, and those checks were getting bigger, even though I wasn't recording anything new, even though it was old content, the checks were still getting bigger because Pluralsight was still acquiring

more customers and getting more subscribers. Um, and I was just, you know, thinking, you know what, if I'd published another course on Pluralsight, I would have, you know, had even more money. Um, and so eventually, you know, DevIQ was not. Making enough money. And, uh, you know, it didn't turn out to be a good long term, uh, company. And part of that was because it was being done by four people as a side project. Nobody was all in. Uh, we didn't have any buddy that was dedicated to marketing.

We didn't have any third party, uh, money that was helping us, uh, get marketing or do any kind of advertising or anything like that. Uh, and so bootstrapping that kind of company and that kind of environment with that kind of Competition, uh, was really tough. Um, and, and so, you know, things, things have changed a little bit today. Uh, in fact, uh, the new newest training company on the block that I know of is dome train that Nick Chapsis is doing.

Um, and I think it's having more success than we had with DevIQ, but largely that's because Nick has over 200, 000 subscribers on YouTube and is able to drive a sizable number of them to those courses. So, um, I'm actually doing a course, uh, for, for him, um, on, on modular monoliths that I'm going to have early next year.

And it definitely is a benefit to some of these marketplaces, whether you're using Blurl site or, or someone else is that they do a lot of the marketing for you. And yeah, you get a reduced cut for the work you've done, but say. 10, 000 people go through your Pluralsight course. Uh, how much work do you have to do to get 10, 000 people to go through your DevIQ course? And it's probably exponentially more

Uh, just because and, and people know that, so they'll wait for the sale. Uh, and so it's, it's tough if you, if you are not already a well known big name in, in the topic area that you're at, uh, it would be difficult for, for most people to just jump in and do that. Um, and, and there are people that do it successfully, like Nick is one and Tim Corey is another, uh, where they've built up a large audience on YouTube, where they have a fan base.

They have people that trust them and know that they're an authority on what they talk about, and then they can go and sell training. Right. But if you try and sell the training first and nobody knows who you are, good luck, right? It's going to be a tough, tough road.

Uh, it gets a lot harder when it's like, okay, but now we have to support licensing and we have to make sure the thing is up all the time. And, you know, turning something into a product is, is a much bigger lift. Um, and that's hard when you've got clients that, you know, are paying the bills and, and want your, your folks to be working on that. So, um, that's, that's been a challenge for me. Uh, and I would say a failure of, of being able to actually produce, uh.

An actual product, uh, I've been successful with open source stuff. I've got lots of new get packages out there that have lots of downloads, but I'm actually selling something or even, or even getting something where you have to sign up, even if it's free, right? Uh, I don't, I don't have anything like that yet.

Uh, and that's something that I'd like to eventually be able to do is build a, a SAS product or, or, or just a product product that, you know, we could sell licenses for, uh, as opposed to selling hours or, or something like that.

Uh, and so teaching people how to build maintainable, uh, monoliths, if you will, uh, is, is something I've become increasingly passionate about. And that's part of why I'm doing that course for, for dome train. Um, and that's kind of what I'm focused on right now in, in my training is, you know, clean architecture and, and modular monoliths. Um, And then, you know, just, just trying to keep helping developers write better software.

I'm, I'm having fun with my YouTube channel, uh, started doing more of that, uh, here in Q4 of 2023. Uh, and it's, it's kind of cool to see that kind of pickup because, um, I've only been doing it for a little while. I've got like five videos published in the last three months or something, but, um, starting to get like a regular cadence of trying to publish one a week and, uh, really seeing the views start to tick up and getting a bunch more subscribers. So that's, that's always nice. Right.

The vanity metrics help.

So if anyone wants to go subscribe to our Dallas and Learn some more about dot net cloud and, uh, modular monoliths. I like that term because I think that describes what we're doing on our team right now. And so I might pick your course up as soon as you're done with it. So go, uh, go work on it.

It was, you know, way less than, you know, most of the other office buildings in the, in way. Uh, and, and it was so cheap that we almost couldn't pass it up. So we ended up buying it and even though it was a little bit of a money pit to fix up, um, it was nice that it already had existing tenants cause we were able to put nimble pros in there. Uh, and, and we would be in one space, we'd be renovating some other space.

We'd have tenants in another space and then we'd have everything shift around and move so that we could, you know, keep renovating different parts of the building as, as we moved around and as tenants moved around. And having the tenants, it was like, uh, if, if you were to buy a duplex and live in one and rent out the other, where like they're kind of paying your mortgage, that was what we were doing. But on a commercial tenant space.

So those other tenants were paying a good chunk of the mortgage. So it wasn't as expensive for the business as it would have been for us to just go buy a building or even just to go rent. It was cheaper than what we were paying in rent at the end of the day. Uh, not counting the upfront cash cost. Um, and we did something similar with a vacation rental. Um, Where, uh, we, you know, after the housing bust, we were lucky to find a vacation rental that was, uh, having a short sale.

And so we bought it for significantly less than, than the previous owner had bought it for like three years earlier. Uh, and, and then, you know, renting that out, there's a, there's a rental company that handles everything. Uh, and it kind of like pays for its, its mortgage and everything from the rentals. So, um, it doesn't make us a lot of money, you know, uh, but it does at least cover its own costs. And so over time we're building that equity.

Or, or if I can't find any business for consulting, like we've still got other, you know, income coming in from other streams, uh, be very unlikely that all of them would suddenly disappear overnight. So, you know, that's, that's, it's all a hedge against, uh, future uncertainty. Right.